Adopting Collaborative Games into Agile Requirements Engineering

Abstract

In agile software development, where great emphasis is put on effective informal communication involving diverse stakeholders, success depends on human and social factors. Not surprisingly, the Agile Manifesto advocates principles and values such as "individuals and interactions over processes and tools", "focus on the customer", "collaborate regularly", "communicate face-to-face within the team" and "have regular team introspection". However, agile methodologies have hardly provided any tools or techniques that aid the human side of software development. Additionally, more and more research suggests that customers no longer should be viewed as a passive source of information but need to be engaged in envisioning future business practice, discovering opportunities, and shaping solutions. To deal with these challenges, we propose a framework for extending Scrum with 9 collaborative games. Collaborative games refer to several structured techniques inspired by game play and designed to facilitate collaboration, foster customer involvement, and stimulate creative thinking. The feedback received from a Scrum team that leveraged our framework in two commercial projects, indicates that the adopted collaborative games: (1) make customers more willing to attend the meeting; (2) foster stakeholders' commitment; and (3) produce better results than the standard approach.

Utilizing online collaborative games to facilitate Agile Software Development

“…Although there have been hundreds of papers related to the application of serious games for teaching software engineering and software project management [10,17,24,25], the interest in using collaborative serious games has not received so much attention yet. An important cornerstone for this research area were innovation games introduced by Hohmann [12] as market and product research techniques and later adopted by Ghanbari et al [7] and Przybyłek & Zakrzewski [23] to support distributed requirements engineering and agile requirements engineering respectively. Likewise, Gelperin [6] defined six collaborative games that support requirements understanding.…”

“…Unfortunately, neither the Agile Manifesto nor the Scrum Guide specify techniques to address the human side of software development. Responding to this challenge, in our previous studies [21,23], we proposed to equip Scrum teams with a set of collaborative games.…”

“…Collaborative games refer to several structured techniques inspired by game play, but designed for the purpose of solving practical problems [23]. They involve strong visual or tactile elements that help the participants leverage multiple dimensions of communication, resulting in richer, deeper, and more meaningful exchanges of information [12,23]. At the same time, they make use of the concepts of teamwork and collaboration, which lead to a variety of measurable societal outcomes.…”

“…Our previous studies [21,23] revealed that playing collaborative games during Scrum meetings improves participants' communication, commitment, and creativity. In this study, we go one step further and make it easier for agile teams to adopt collaborative games.…”

Model Driven Architecture and Agile Methodologies: Reflexion and discussion of their combination

“…Agility puts the customer at the center of the development process of a project [1] and aims to develop software projects in the shortest possible time that satisfies all customer requirements and take into account requirements change, which is a fundamental principle of Agility.…”